The title "Carrying Fire" is taken from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men,in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talks about his own father. “I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen that he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

A Visit to Czech Republic

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I knew quite a bit about my father's early life, his
marriage to my mother, a little bit about his stateside Air Force
training, but had almost no information about his war time
experience. Then in April 2005 we had a breakthrough that led us to
the 398th Bomb Group Memorial Association and to the
monument to the Christensen crew near Slany in the Czech Republic.
Allen Ostrom put me in touch with some Czech friends who urged us to
come to a memorial service scheduled in Slany in June.

On that first trip to the Czech
Republic in June 2005 I met Jaromir Kohout who handed me a booklet
he had written with Jaromir Kveton entitled 398th Bomb Group a
Česká Republika, first published in 2000.

In the early 1985, Jaromir and his
brother Martin, then both in their 20’s, formed a group called SLET
Pilsen, dedicated to finding and commemorating USAAF crash sites in
their country. Jaromir wrote, “We do this so that people know of
young boys who flew and were shot down over our country.” They were
soon joined by several others with similar interests including
co-author Jaromir Kveton and another friend, Jan Zdiarsky. Jan is
the founder and director of the Museum
of the Air Battle Over the Ore Mountains On September 11, 1944,
at Kovarska, near the German border. Jan’s museum is dedicated to
that single air battle, known as “Black Monday,” in which over 50
aircraft were shot down including large numbers B-17s from the 100th
and 95th Bomb Groups, as well as over 50% of the German fighters sent
against them. Jan is also involved in other WWII research projects
and contributed some of the photography to Jaromir’s book.

In The 398th Bomb Group and the
Czech Republic Jaromir Kohout wrote about the history of the
398th Bomb Group and the airfield at Nuthampstead, some of the
group’s early missions into Germany, and most of their missions
over Czech territory, including the accidental bombing of Prague on
Feb 14, 1945, and their final mission of the war against the Skoda
production facility at Pilsen on April 25. A good portion of their
work concerns the fate of Christensen crew after their damaged plane
disappeared into the clouds on March 2, 1945. It contained
information and photos I had never seen, and included several
eyewitness accounts of the plane crash, and accounts of the burial of
crew members and their recovery by the American Graves Registration
Service after the war. Sixty years after that event my Czech friends
simply handed me this valuable key to some of the information I had
been seeking for decades. They have my undying gratitude.

Allan Ostrom and Jan Zdiarsky

Surviving Tail Gunner Selmer Haakenson with Jaromir's book.

This booklet is written in Czech of course, When I got home I showed it to a couple people from the Czech Republic to get some translation, but with little success. Then my daughter-in-law Vanessa, who has a translation business -- mainly English to Spanish -- secretly took the booklet and paid an excellent Czech translator to do the job. She never told us what it cost her but I value my English copy as much as the original. Thank you, Vanessa!

Lt. Donald R. Christensen

About Me

"This is a tribute to my father's life and his war. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia (today's Czech Republic.) Tail gunner Selmer Haakenson was the sole survivor. I was two and a half years old.

I have been haunted by the loss of my father all my life, and after 70 years I still grieve. For the last 25 years or more I have been sporadically combing through old papers and photographs, military records, books relating to the 8th Air Force, and talking with many veterans of the 398th BG. I have been wanting to tell his story for a long time, and the 70th anniversary of his death seems like an appropriate time to get off my duff and honor his memory in words and pictures."

My Mission

I am a World War II researcher and my mission has been mainly to find out about my father. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia

I have been been on this quest most of my life, but more seriously in the last 25 years or so. Now I'm ready to write about it.

Thank you for visiting my page and taking the time to read this material. I welcome all comments.

To see a slideshow that I made honoring the 70th anniversary of my father's fatal plane crash, see here.